The Impending Bandwidth Wars

A year ago the only online storage I routinely purchased as a shared hosting account and a Screencast.com profile. Now I am full up with Amazon, Dropbox and client access from three other services. We have literally seen a sea change in cloud computing over the past 18 months for smaller businesses and individuals. Enterprise users may find all of this old hat (or a revelation, suffering through poky frame relays and VPNs of various stripes), but the idea of viable remote storage for anything more complex than mail and Word files at a commodity price point seemed like a shimmering mirage.

Any long-time users of PPT remembering hoary tricks like saving-as files to omit bloat, and fighting through multimedia decks that could quickly end up in the 40MB+ territory surely looked upon the offers like 100MB of free (or cheap) storage as far too miserly. Users in specialized industries, such as film, build in storage and transfer as an operating cost, but in the with the days of $5 fax pages as a reimbursable expense being long distant, explaining to clients or accounting that remote storage that was exponentially more expensive that a removable drive (I just purchased a 1TB USB 2.5″ drive that fits in my pocket for $90) as worthwhile is a hard sell.

Now, storage is literally being given away. Amazon and Apple will store your purchases in the cloud indefinitely, for free. And most services are making plans available in the $1GB/year range now for any kind file storage you wish. Dropbox claims to have a particularly clever system for syncing multiple machines (I qualify it only because I’m still testing it). I have finally jumped in with both feet, seeking to untangle myself from the collection of flash drives that clutter my desk and every piece of luggage I own. Taking an aggressive stance with archiving, I intend to move all my current client work into a synced cloud account (100GB). It is very exciting.

But, like the early knocks on the Amazon Cloud Drive, it’s also a little frustrating. My initial load in was only about 30GB (around 11,000 files). After two days, about 80% of the files are synced — using Dropbox’s crafty management system, that’s most of the files, but none of the large files. So the folders are incomplete, awaiting the heavy duty payloads you take for granted using terabytes of storage locally. Save as many iterations as you need! Never delete!

I’m being told that my first sync will be complete in about 5 days. People reported that 40GB syncs with Amazon’s music service took a month. The reasons for this have to do with both upstream and downstream issues. Upstream, providers are worried about getting besieged on launches (and pricing) and downstream users are bottle necked by antiquated broadband speeds (and pricing).

The challenge is no longer capacity but throughput. At the margin I’m a little disappointed by the pricing for Dropbox, Box.net and the Amazon Cloud, but not that much. Especially since any old gear head knows there is a difference between maxing out your local hard drive (for performance issues) versus buying what you need from Amazon or JungleDisk. With players like Bitcasa on the horizon, in a year or two we are going to see consumer cloud solutions bumping into terabyte capacity.

We look enviously at countries like South Korea, with Gigabit connections coming as soon as next year, while I look wanly at my ‘business’ cable plan and upload speeds of about 90K/sec, and wonder how this synced future is even plausible for SOHO users. Already hemmed in by data caps for mobile, carping by cable providers over Netflix streaming, the promises of VOIP and remote everything remain maddeningly in the distance until secure affordable bandwidth concomitant with other technological advances.

I’m speaking anecdotally (it’s a blog — happens), but as I think about other benchmarks of tech spending, the persistence of bandwidth rates is an outlier. In the course of reviewing cloud storage and building a new system, I looked into updating my NAS (Network Attached Storage) device. The 4 drive, 600GB ($1,300 in 2007) box can be replaced by a 2 drive 1TB box for $300 (both are set up as RAID devices). There are some hair splitting differences about SOHO versus more robust solutions, but the issue of Ethernet throughput are simply outflanked by USB 3.0 ports (and both are hampered by disk speeds more than anything).

There are very large sums at play, so it’s not going to end easily and conveniently for everyone involved. The arguments run the gamut from heavily invested ideological battles about government regulation to arcane technological disputes about peering agreements and what constitutes a CDN. But those are all the purview of embattled trolls who relish endless, circular debate. For the average business user who wants all this to recede into the background, the question simply remains: when is the pricing of my connection going to mirror the cost of my storage? Until then, we are all consigned to a patchwork of file sharing services, bags full of external drives and maddening time stamp conflicts leaving us confused about what is actually now.